TL;DR I founded a Forum Games Discord server that acts as a general chatroom for Forum Games regulars, with individual chat rooms that have silly rules, much like threads here. If you're interested in the idea, come chat with us for a bit, or discuss it here!

Ok here's the rationale for all of this:

Spoiler:

Forums games has changed and evolved a lot over the time I've been here. I've been active in the community on and off here since November 2008, and over the course of nine years I've noticed definite trends and patterns, often influenced by the game preferences of the people who post here and how active they are. I think it's safe to same I've started some trends myself as well.

In the state that the forum is in now, it's mostly just fractured into several different off topic random discussion threads. This is because those threads either don't have clear topics or goals to begin with (very abstract meta-roleplay threads like JESUS CHRIST and you must not kill flicky), or because all of the gameplay is based on meta-aspects of the post like timing and double posting, all of which is tracked by bots so the content of the posts in the threads themselves is mostly trivial (see: double post, count to a million, etc.). This is not a criticism. I'm having fun with this state of things in my latest return to the internet from irl. But it's certainly far cry from the days of yore where we would have multiple RPGs running at once. Or all of those fiddly mechanical games Vytron loved.

The point is, all the discussion reminded me of the old *hugs* thread IRC channel. Which is a thing that did exist at one point, although I'm not sure if anyone from that long ago is even around anymore. Forum Games used to be so big that individual threads had their own sub-communities, and that's where I started. That IRC channel was run by Sean, who I don't think is active more, and I eventually stopped using it because it was mostly full of other people's friends from other parts of the forum who I didn't know. Also I was a console gamer nerd not a computer nerd so I was never comfy with IRC.

BUT here's the thing: we can do better than IRC channels now! We can create Discord servers! Discord has all the functions of IRC plus a lot of extra benefits, and I feel like a lot of the activity that takes place on this forum would transition well to Discord chat rooms. It would make the conversational tone we've developed much more natural. You could have individual side chats for individual threads. All of the bots that count scores in threads here could probably function on discord as well. And if any of y'all like video games we could do that too. There's a lot of overlap in demographics there, I think.

Opinions?

Last edited by thecamoninja on Thu May 11, 2017 12:31 pm UTC, edited 3 times in total.

Seriously, though. I'd give it a go if someone sets it up (since it has a web version, I'll go easy on the stallmanism). I will probably need reminders too: I've had IRC a keypress away for years, but I hardly remember to use it.

For some reason the name "Discord' always makes me think it has to do with vinyl records, maybe because of the similarity to Discogs.com (which is an invaluable resource). Anyway, I might give it a try sometime, but it's late now.

Apparently it's been so long since the last time I coded anything, that I internalised the barbaric ways of the plebs. I might need a late night coding session to cleanse myself. I could pick up on the 3-dimensional orbit simulator for example and get it to detect one completed lap correctly for once...